To Whom It May Concern

[9thdoctor]

At a time when I thought I was on good terms with Ted, he repeatedly called me a pedophile. Later, he repeatedly called me an extortionist.

Yikes, I never saw that. I just tried searching for “pedophile”, thinking it wasn’t a word that would turn up so many results, but forget it, there’s way too many to sift through to find any exchanges where he did that. But I did find this:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9090&view=findpost&p=105032

So it’s clear Ted was duly warned. There was also a post he did upwards of a year ago, where he lit into MSK in a way that was way beyond the acceptable. MSK deleted it, then put Ted on moderation, which lasted many months, during which time he didn’t post here. I like Ted quite a bit, so I don’t mean to be coming down on anyone’s side in this, and do feel that his “hypocrite” post was like a straw breaking a camel’s back. Meaning, by itself, the reaction seems out of proportion.

I still hope the whole thing blows over, otherwise, he does have his own site, and he ought to produce some fresh material for it.

http://radicalsforhappiness.blogspot.com/

[9thdoctor]

One more point to add: My first experience with online discussion groups was Jimbo Wales’s MDOP (Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy) where, as the name suggests, every post was moderated.

[Philip Coates]

Subject: I'm Somewhat Dubious: Prove it.

> [Ted] repeatedly called me a pedophile. Later, he repeatedly called me an extortionist. [GHS]

Huh???

The first would certainly surprise me; the second I'd want to know what the context is. Certainly looks to be a serious over-the-top statement by Ted which it would be desirable to back up.

I've found George to misstate or oversimplify or drop the context on several occasions:

1. Don't trust the accuracy of George's one word summary without seeing the full quote in several sentences of context.

2. Even better(as people are always asking for a link here): Give us the link so we can judge for ourselves.

Edited April 4, 2011 by Philip Coates

[George H. Smith]

Subject: I'm Somewhat Dubious: Prove it.

> [Ted] repeatedly called me a pedophile. Later, he repeatedly called me an extortionist. [GHS]

Huh???

The first would certainly surprise me; the second I'd want to know what the context is. Certainly looks to be a serious over-the-top statement by Ted which it would be desirable to back up.

I've found George to misstate or oversimplify or drop the context on several occasions:

1. Don't trust the accuracy of George's one word summary without seeing the full quote in several sentences of context.

2. Even better(as people are always asking for a link here): Give us the link so we can judge for ourselves.

The pedophile remarks occurred on the Kinsella thread. Michael deleted them. The extortionist remarks appeared repeatedly -- sometimes in large font, along with a definition of "extortion" -- on my plagiarism thread. I don't know if they have been deleted or not. Find the posts yourself.

You could have simply requested the links without all the editorializing. So do you really want to start a flamewar with me that badly? If you do, I will happily oblige, and I will rip you to pieces.

Fair warning, Phil -- and I mean it.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

George,

Did you miss it?

This thread wasn't about Phil.

What's worse, it deals with forum behavior, his topic of compulsion.

I think that bothered him because look at how he posted. He practically called you a liar without having any evidence himself.

And there are several drop-dead easy ways to search this forum if he was so interested.

So here we are, letting him jigger this thread into something about Phil.

(Attention junkies can get awfully clever when the craving hits and they need a fix.)

Michael

[pippi]

I think this whole thing is sad

(edited to add the frowny face-It is appropriate imho)

Edited April 4, 2011 by pippi

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Pippi,

You now own a forum. If it grows, as I hope it does if that is what you truly want, you will have to learn how to deal with this stuff. You have no choice about that. You only have a choice about what you do about it when it happens.

If someday you find yourself dealing with issues like this (believe me, they will come) and don't know what to do because everything you do seems to make it worse, shoot me a PM. I'll be more than glad to help if I can.

Michael

[Philip Coates]

Notice the hostility - defensiveness and unwillingness and mislabelling - when asked for evidence:

"Find the posts yourself." [George}

"..really want to start a flamewar with me.." [George]

"He practically called you a liar" [MSK]

"this [becomes] something about Phil [MSK]

Here's a free tip for you two dudes: When someone asks for evidence, just provide the evidence if you've actually retained an easily accessible copy of it. (Don't get into side issues. Let the evidence speak for itself.)

That's the way to shut someone up who you resent who asks for proof or documentation: Provide it.

[Reidy]

OL has a feature that makes this sort of thing easier to deal with than some may realize.

Near the upper right, when you are logged in, you'll see the photo you posted (or the space for it). Mouse over and "Your Profile" will pop up. Click on the photo area, click Edit my Profile in the upper right, then Manage Ignored Users. Type in the screen names of someone whose posts you don't want to read, then Save Changes.

I've done this for several members; the list would probably not surprise OL regulars.

[George H. Smith]

Notice the hostility - defensiveness and unwillingness and mislabelling - when asked for evidence:

"Find the posts yourself." [George}

"..really want to start a flamewar with me.." [George]

"He practically called you a liar" [MSK]

"this [becomes] something about Phil [MSK]

Here's a free tip for you two dudes: When someone asks for evidence, just provide the evidence if you've actually retained an easily accessible copy of it. (Don't get into side issues. Let the evidence speak for itself.)

That's the way to shut someone up who you resent who asks for proof or documentation: Provide it.

Okay, dude, since you are such a sticker for documentation, when do you plan on responding to this post from the sister thread?

What's disruptive is when people decide they enormously resent my criticisms and then launch post after post trying to "bring me down". Consider this thread as proof. Go back and read it. It's short enough. I didn't start off by attacking individuals but by critiquing a pattern and what consequences follow, I took the high road and talked about civility, etc. It was George, Shayne, Jeff, etc. who decided to attack me personally. And so then, I responded to them personally.

You should follow your own advice. Go back through this short thread, and then quote even one instance where I attacked you personally. I want to see the remark. I want to see what you regard as a personal attack.

Talk about a pattern. You often complain about personal attacks when there haven't been any. Consider this thread as proof.

To put this matter in your terms:

I've found Phil to misstate or oversimplify or drop the context on several occasions, so I advise people not to trust the accuracy of his his claims about having been attacked personally without seeing the passage in question.

So let's see the documentation, dude. As you put it: Let the evidence speak for itself. (You should probably reply on the original thread.)

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

George,

Did you miss it?

This thread wasn't about Phil.

What's worse, it deals with forum behavior, his topic of compulsion.

I think that bothered him because look at how he posted. He practically called you a liar without having any evidence himself.

And there are several drop-dead easy ways to search this forum if he was so interested.

So here we are, letting him jigger this thread into something about Phil.

(Attention junkies can get awfully clever when the craving hits and they need a fix.)

Michael

As you will have seen by now, Phil responded to your post in the predictable way. We will now see how he reacts to my legitimate request for documentation, which I posted before his demand but which he ignored. .

Here is my prediction: Phil, if he replies at all, will respond by mimicking my comment: Find the post(s) yourself -- even though the two cases are not parallel, because I have no idea what words I should even look for. I know what to do after this, but I won't reveal my strategy here.

I didn't attack Phil personally -- I didn't even come close -- so if he is truly serious about this civility stuff, he will say he made a mistake and apologize. I bet he will never do this. Instead, we will see him go into his Slip 'n' Slide routine. Care to give me odds?

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

George,

Phil is so goddam lazy it's not funny.

(To Phil--go to the search function, open advanced, type in George under "Find Words," type in Ted Keer under "Find Author," choose to search in all forums and choose to display results as posts. Then go through and read some, you lazy bum.)

For someone who claims to be an expert in computer languages, this is really elementary stuff. Folks don't even need to read code--just read the friggin field instructions on the search page and fill them out like you do any form.

Anyway, here are two Keer posts that back you up. Calling you a pedophile (he used the term practitioner of man-boy-love--and he accused you of bestiality and being a rapist), was his odd way of baiting you when you said, "The age of the Internet has taught intelligent people a valuable lesson, namely, not to take personal attacks very seriously." (This quote of yours can be found by going to the link in the excerpt below):

It doesn't surprise me that you, George H. Smith, hold these positions as a notorious advocate and practitioner of b********y and m**-*** love. But surely you understand the difference between something being illegal and something being actionable. Or do r*****s like you, George H. Smith, fail to make the distinction?

I was the one to put in the asterisks in the place of the words. This really pissed Keer off, too, even after I posted to him why I did it. Control freaks don't like it when you mess in their idiocy and defuse their malicious intent. Here are the reasons I gave:

The posts here on OL get crawled by Google, Yahoo! and Bing, (and other search engines) so your little prank to make your point could actually be used later by some religious nut--one who is disgruntled by George's work on atheism--from a Google search. To avoid that, I changed the offending language and replaced it with asterisks.

Let's say from now on, that kind of prank is illegal on this site.

As for the extortionist thing here is a link. Since this is about the Wendy thing and it might be a distraction to quote long posts from that thread here, interested parties can go to that link and read a few posts, both after and before.

To the interested parties--if you go before, you will see where Keer actually started by "explaining" the various and sundry delusions of anarchists to George.

(Back to Goerge.) Keer didn't actually accuse you of being an extortionist in the same manner a person filing a complaint would. He basically insinuated (in a really weasely way) that since you are already engaged in extortion, you should get a lawyer. But his focus was on showing others how much he knew about law, not on condemning your "extortion."

(I'm sure you find that comforting. )

There. I've wasted unrepeatable moments of my life to satisfy the whims of the attention-starved lazy-ass Phil.

But I will get to Phil in a different post. I've figured out his method, so I'm going to present it.

From that point on, there will be a template to fit his attention-getting attempts into when they happen--at least for one of his most common scripts. People will be able to take this crap when it happens, assign the different parts to the different sections of the process, and watch it unfold like clockwork. I'm thinking of calling it the Coatesian Martyr Method. The payoff is unmerited attention, of course, but I haven't yet figured out how to work that idea into the title and still have it sound cool.

Michael

[Philip Coates]

> Ted Keer, on 01 December 2010 - 06:39 PM, said:

"It doesn't surprise me that you, George H. Smith, hold these positions as a notorious advocate and practitioner of b********y and m**-*** love. But surely you understand the difference between something being illegal and something being actionable. Or do r*****s like you, George H. Smith, fail to make the distinction?"

Michael, thank you for answering:

I didn't read the Kinsella thread. Ted was way out of line making these charges and you were right to asterisk them out.

Even if George were the things Ted accuses him of (which I would very much doubt), this is personal attack. It's not relevant or appropriate. Ted should have stuck to the issues.

Once again: "Attack the ideas. Not the person."

If I were George I would have been extremely offended by this sort of thing. Especially the nature of those charges, they verge on the libelous or slanderous.

Edited April 4, 2011 by Philip Coates

[Brant Gaede]

> Ted Keer, on 01 December 2010 - 06:39 PM, said:

"It doesn't surprise me that you, George H. Smith, hold these positions as a notorious advocate and practitioner of b********y and m**-*** love. But surely you understand the difference between something being illegal and something being actionable. Or do r*****s like you, George H. Smith, fail to make the distinction?"

Michael, thank you for answering:

I didn't read the Kinsella thread. Ted was way out of line making these charges and you were right to asterisk them out.

Even if George were the things Ted accuses him of (which I would very much doubt), this is personal attack. It's not relevant or appropriate. Ted should have stuck to the issues.

Once again: "Attack the ideas. Not the person."

If I were George I would have been extremely offended by this sort of thing. Especially the nature of those charges, they verge on the libelous or slanderous.

After all but acusing George of being a liar you are all but acusing him of not being "extremely offended."

--Brant

[sjw]

Phil, stop being a trolling hypocrite. I and others have a number of times underscored the principles behind why you are wrong and you keep on going anyway. Don't tell us that you're following reason. You're just following your own civility dogma.

Shayne

[George H. Smith]

> Ted Keer, on 01 December 2010 - 06:39 PM, said:

"It doesn't surprise me that you, George H. Smith, hold these positions as a notorious advocate and practitioner of b********y and m**-*** love. But surely you understand the difference between something being illegal and something being actionable. Or do r*****s like you, George H. Smith, fail to make the distinction?"

Michael, thank you for answering:

I didn't read the Kinsella thread. Ted was way out of line making these charges and you were right to asterisk them out.

Even if George were the things Ted accuses him of, this is personal attack. It's not relevant or appropriate. Ted should have stuck to the issues.

Once again: "Attack the ideas. Not the person."

If I were George I would have been extremely offended by this sort of thing. Especially the nature of those charges, they verge on the libelous or slanderous.

I wasn't offended by either attack because they were so over the top. It's as if a lunatic were to accuse me of being a serial killer. This might be annoying but I would not be offended. Someone has to mean something to me personally before he can offend me. A stranger cannot do it, especially if that stranger is a nut-case.

Ted made the pedophile remarks in more than one post. They came out of nowhere, after I had argued that libel and slander should not be illegal, because we do not have property rights in the opinions of others. Rather than argue with me, Ted went on his rants as if to say, "So you don't think libel and slander should be illegal? Okay, what do you plan to do about this?"

It was one of the dumbest strategies possible. Suppose I had believed in slander and libel laws. Would Ted have expected me to sue him? And just because I don't think x should be illegal doesn't mean that I think x is morally right.

Ted tried to tie all this into my anarchism, but it has nothing to do with anarchism per se. I pretty much stopped responding to Ted's posts after this.

Contrary to Michael's comment, Ted did indeed accuse me outright of committing extortion in regard to Wendy. He wrote at least six posts on this subject, and at least one of them makes this point explicitly.

The weird thing about a couple of those posts is that they are written in a very large font, as if his posts could not be read otherwise. If writing in caps constitutes shouting, writing in letters that size can only qualify as hysterical screaming. That aspect bothered me more than anything else. I got the feeling I was dealing with someone who was mentally unbalanced.

I got a similar feeling when Ted started interjecting his "blah, blah, blah" posts. Once or twice might be understandable, but the repetitiveness creeped me out. That's when I put Ted on "ignore." After that, I think I asked a question based on one of Ted's legal points (the "ignore" function does not delete comments quoted by someone else), but that was it.

But note this well: I never -- not once -- lectured Ted about civility. I never told him how calling people names is irrelevant or bogs down a thread. What would have been the point? I told him to knock it off, in effect, and that is a much different response. Even that didn't help, of course, but I didn't expect it would.

Giving sermons will have no civilizing effect on the Wild West that is the Internet, especially in unmoderated forums. Timid souls who don't like all the gunfire should seek out moderated forums or start one themselves. Otherwise, the best recourse is to learn how to use a gun and to take care of business oneself, as the need arises.

Since I have chosen to live in unmoderated territory, I expect to take my share of hits. For me to complain about being the target of invectives and insults would be like a boxer who climbs in the ring and then complains whenever he gets punched.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael, thank you for answering:

Phil,

I appreciate the thank you, but I'm not letting you off the hook. Look at this:

Phil is so goddam lazy it's not funny.

I didn't read the Kinsella thread.

You can't make this stuff up.

You asked for the source after casting unwarranted doubt on George's post, and you can't even be bothered to click on a friggin' link and read the thing because the text is not spoon-fed to you right here?

Unbelievable!

Does Your Highness want a foot-rub and grapes the next time someone supplies you with information to satisfy one of your your petulant demands?

Michael

[Philip Coates]

> Does Your Highness want a foot-rub and grapes

Please.

[sjw]

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Phil,

"Please" my foot.

I spent precious time out of my life to provide you with something you demanded and you blow it off?

Who the hell do you think you are?

You may not value my time, but I do.

Speaking of time, you found plenty of time to make unwarranted insinuations about George, but you don't have time to read the very material you ask for.

Pretty, dude. Real pretty.

If I sound pissed, that's because I am.

Stop being so damn lazy. Or hell, be lazy for all I care.

But stop playing games when people who actually do research are discussing stuff. You are way out of your league.

btw - That's easy to fix, but you gotta fix your laziness first. I suspect that is not so easy to fix.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

> Does Your Highness want a foot-rub and grapes

Please.

And dancing girls.

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

Speaking of time, you found plenty of time to make unwarranted insinuations about George, but you don't have time to read the very material you ask for.

Insinuations? Phil make insinuations? Perish the thought!

Phil was merely calling attention to a pattern -- a factual pattern, of course -- he has detected in my posts, namely: "I've found George to misstate or oversimplify or drop the context on several occasions."

Working from this factual pattern, Phil, the standard-bearer of reason who would never stoop to low-life tactics, drew this perfectly logical conclusion: "Don't trust the accuracy of George's one word summary without seeing the full quote in several sentences of context."

Next, Phil -- again motivated by nothing more than his love of truth -- demanded documentation that would prove that Ted actually said the things I attributed to him.

And how did you and I respond to Phil's objective quest for evidence? We responded with "hostility - defensiveness and unwillingness and mislabelling - when asked for evidence." For example, I made the outrageous statement, after pointing Phil to the relevant threads, "Find the posts yourself." And you were so defensive and irrational as to say, "He practically called you a liar."

Face it, Michael. You and I, filled with resentment over the fact that Phil was being so rational, deserved his parting admonition: "That's the way to shut someone up who you resent who asks for proof or documentation: Provide it."

No insults, incivility, or insinuations here. Just facts and logic. Just Phil, the only rational dude in Dudedom, willing to risk martyrdom yet again in defense of reason.

We should be grateful.

Ghs

[Philip Coates]

You guys are definitely wearing me down with all these attacks.

I'm getting more inclined to simply let people draw their own conclusions and not try to respond to everything.

[9thdoctor]

You guys are definitely wearing me down with all these attacks.

I'm getting more inclined to simply let people draw their own conclusions and not try to respond to everything.

No Phil, we’re almost convinced! All of us. Just one more extensive explanation is all it will take. So again, cast your spell. Once more, unto the breach…

[caroljane]

You guys are definitely wearing me down with all these attacks.

I'm getting more inclined to simply let people draw their own conclusions and not try to respond to everything.

No Phil, we’re almost convinced! All of us. Just one more extensive explanation is all it will take. So again, cast your spell. Once more, unto the breach…

Just fantastic, ND. I felt that my pinup the Blessed Brian was speaking directly to the Toronto Maple Leafs in their current desperate hour.

The thanks of a grateful Nation are yours.

Now lay off Phil for a while, eh?